Now halfway through his second year at Stamford Bridge, the Brazilian continues to shine in the heart of our defence, aging like a fine wine at the age of 37.

Thomas Tuchel heaped praise on Thiago Silva yesterday in the wake of his contract extension, and the news was met with widespread delight by Blues fans everywhere, who so quickly became enamoured with the defender following his arrival from PSG in the summer of 2020.

A class act on the pitch, Thiago Silva is a great man off it, too, and he gave us some of his time ahead of another huge home game to talk Tuchel, Tottenham, and fresh targets…

Thiago, congratulations on the new deal. You seem very settled here at Chelsea…

Yes of course, I’m very good here. That’s also thanks to the career I had at Milan, and PSG. It means I arrived at Chelsea as an experienced player.

Also, the supporters are always by my side. That’s very important because they’re there even if we’re losing, and if they support it’s also because I’ve been playing well. Now the club have given me this opportunity to continue to do this, and I’m going to give everything to keep playing at this level.

Your relationship with Chelsea fans has been great right from the start. How important is that to you?

For me it’s great, I never imagined that I would live this experience in my career. I felt it a bit at Milan, also in Paris, but here it’s been like this since the first day. When you see the images of the fans chanting my name at the end of the Champions League final, even if I hadn’t played all of the games because I’d been injured, for me it’s also feels like a recognition for everything that I’ve done.

You’ve already played 29 times for club and country this season. What is the secret to your longevity?

The first thing is preparation, the organisation, not just from the players but from all of the staff. I have a really good relationship with the staff. It’s great if I’m feeling tired I can speak to the coaching staff, and I can say that it might be risky to play certain matches, and we think about it and we decide whether it’s better to play or to rest.

The relationship we have means we can speak freely to each other. We don’t hide things, and we speak clearly, just as we did before the Liverpool game. I said I thought I wasn’t in the shape to play 90 minutes, I told Thomas, and although I played 90 minutes he knows if I feel something then I will tell him, and he knows if I didn’t come off against Liverpool it’s because I felt well. It’s a great relationship we have.

Then it’s about the recovery after every match. I’m somebody who doesn’t go out much, I stay home with my family, and I recover at home as well. I’m one of the first to arrive at the training ground and one of the last to leave, because I do my recovery here. I’m 37 so I think it’s necessary to do the maximum, especially when you’re at a club like Chelsea who have given me this new opportunity. You have to give something else, and to be able to give something else the recovery is extremely important.

The 2022 World Cup has been a target of yours that you haven’t made a secret of and that tournament is on the horizon now. How much are you looking forward to it?

The World Cup is here, it’s only 10 months away, so it’s here. With Brazil we know everyone will make us favourites, but we’re keeping our feet on the ground, because it’s not easy to win a World Cup.

It’s been a while since Brazil won the World Cup but we have a really good team, good technical, physical, medical staff, we’re in a good place and that’s the big positive with the World Cup being so near.

Even if we still have time to prepare, the thing with Brazil is it’s hard to predict who will play at the World Cup because each week, each month another great player steps up, playing at a high level. That is a problem really for the coach, so we just have to continue playing at this high level to arrive at the World Cup in good shape. It will be my last and I will do everything I can to bring it back to Brazil.

For Chelsea, it’s Tottenham up next…

It’s not a story of these local derbies being better than others, but there is something more to these games especially for the supporters.

It’s an added motivation for us and for the supporters especially as we’re playing at home, so we need to play extremely well. They haven’t lost since Antonio Conte arrived so we’re going to try to put them into difficulty. We’ll play at the highest level possible because to beat teams like this you need to play at that level, as we did when we played there in the Premier League.

We need a good result at home to go into the second leg to make sure we reach the final.

You scored away at Spurs earlier in the season and three of your four Chelsea goals have come against our London rivals. Does that make it extra special?

Yes, it was very special to score that goal, especially for a defender like myself, who doesn’t get into the box very often to score goals.

It’s the same feeling I had when I scored against Marseille with the PSG shirt on, it was also in the League Cup, I scored two penalties in the same game, it was a special feeling. The supporters there were incredible like they are here, so I hope it will happen many more times and I hope it will happen in the next game!

Does it feel like we have unfinished business at Wembley after losing a cup final there last season?

It’s not a revenge for me. In football you win and you lose, we lost the FA Cup final and it was difficult, frankly it was very difficult because we played a really good game. Leicester did too, but we deserved more out of it.

Football isn’t just about what you deserve, though. Sometimes in football the team that deserves to win loses and vice versa, but that defeat gave us a bit more motivation for the Champions League final. I think that’s why we went onto the pitch against Man City with a different mentality and we deserved to win that final.

This year it’s different, it’s a different team, it will be a different opposition in the final if we get there, and we’ve got to play the semi-final first. We don’t know what will happen in those games, we can’t control the result in a football match but we can control our preparation, so if we prepare ourselves correctly we’ll play at a very high level, and when you do that you’re much closer to winning.